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The growth of 4G networks around the world is boosting average connection speeds to 3-4 Mbps and on some networks upwards of 14 Mbps, paving the way for high-definition video to grow more commonplace on mobile networks, according to Roman Kikta, author of "The Wireless Internet Crash Course". Kikta points out that leading edge technology enhancements such as Magnolia Broadband's Adaptive Antenna Technology (AAT) is showing to increase carriers data networks performance by doubling connectivity speeds, while improving coverage and capacity by 40%. Kikta states that AAT will benefit mobile carriers as they address Video, which accounted for half of mobile traffic in 2012, and is expected to make up over 75% of it within the next few years. Kikta cites HD cameras on devices and consumers needs for uploading to their social networks as key contributors to this mobile data consumption. Furthermore, Video chats, GPS apps, handheld games, and other applications could add to the demand for mobile networks as well.

Wireless data traffic is expected to grow 66% a year for the next five years. That means, by 2017, monthly mobile data traffic will reach 11.2 exabytes per month, or 13 times what it is right now. Other data points in the report underscore how big the mobile world has become and how quickly it will grow to be much, much bigger. Last year, some 4.3 billion people around the world had mobile devices, a population that will grow by close to a billion in five years.

A new report just released from Cisco states that global traffic on data networks grew by 70% in 2012. Cisco offered a comparison that suggests how big mobile has become: The traffic on mobile data networks in 2012 -- 885 petabytes -- was nearly 12 times greater than total Internet traffic around the world in 2000, back when the web was taking off.

The way to win in mobile is to solve an exceptionally difficult problem. Apple first did it by streamlining the mobile experience through an integrated OS and app-discovery and installation experience. Google then went a step further and crunched mountains of data to make mobile services breathtakingly powerful. The next big mobile company needs to be prepared to do something equally hard. And probably different.

Yet there's no sign that Google has stopped pushing itself to do even harder things. And that is why I think Google is both the mobile company of the year in 2012 and 2013.

Two-thirds of the world's mobile data traffic will be video by 2017. Mobile video will increase 16-fold between 2012 and 2017, accounting for over 66 percent of total mobile data traffic by the end of the forecast period.

Mobile-connected tablets will generate more traffic in 2017 than the entire global mobile network in 2012. The amount of mobile data traffic generated by tablets in 2017 (1.3 exabytes per month) will be 1.5 times higher than the total amount of global mobile data traffic in 2012 (885 petabytes per month).

The average smartphone will generate 2.7 GB of traffic per month in 2017, an 8-fold increase over the 2012 average of 342 MB per month. Aggregate smartphone traffic in 2017 will be 19 times greater than it is today, with a CAGR of 81 percent.

By 2017, almost 21 exabytes of mobile data traffic will be offloaded to the fixed network by means of Wi-Fi devices and femtocells each month. Without Wi-Fi and femtocell offload, total mobile data traffic would grow at a CAGR of 74 percent between 2012 and 2017 (16-fold growth), instead of the projected CAGR of 66 percent (13-fold growth).

Global mobile data traffic grew 70 percent in 2012. Global mobile data traffic reached 885 petabytes per month at the end of 2012, up from 520 petabytes per month at the end of 2011.

Mobile network connection speeds more than doubled in 2012. Globally, the average mobile network downstream speed in 2012 was 526 kilobits per second (kbps), up from 248 kbps in 2011. The average mobile network connection speed for smartphones in 2012 was 2,064 kbps, up from 1,211 kbps in 2011. The average mobile network connection speed for tablets in 2012 was 3,683 kbps, up from 2,030 kbps in 2011.

In 2012, a fourth-generation (4G) connection generated 19 times more traffic on average than a non-4G connection. Although 4G connections represent only 0.9 percent of mobile connections today, they already account for 14 percent of mobile data traffic.

The top 1 percent of mobile data subscribers generate 16 percent of mobile data traffic, down from 52 percent at the beginning of 2010. According to a mobile data usage study conducted by Cisco, mobile data traffic has evened out over the last year and is now lower than the 1:20 ratio that has been true of fixed networks for several years.

Average smartphone usage grew 81 percent in 2012. The average amount of traffic per smartphone in 2012 was 342 MB per month, up from 189 MB per month in 2011.

More than 17 million Apple and Android devices, with tablets outpacing smartphones, were activated on Christmas Day, smashing last year’s record by more than 2.5 times. Christmas Day is the largest single activation day of each year, as consumers unwrap new smartphones around the world. This year was no different, with research revealing the final week of 2012 was the busiest for device activation and app downloads since Apple and Android smartphones first went on sale.

Roll-on the era of uplink traffic!! Legacy enterprise software providers such as SAP and cloud vendors such as Workday are both realizing the necessity of the mobile cloud, building out the capabilities to cater to the mobile explosion.

Posted by: Administrator
Created on: Sun 27 January 2013 22:25
Last modified: Never

Roll-on the era of uplink traffic!! Legacy enterprise software providers such as SAP and cloud vendors such as Workday are both realizing the necessity of the mobile cloud, building out the capabilities to cater to the mobile explosion.

Posted by: Administrator
Created on: Sun 27 January 2013 22:25
Last modified: Never

Today’s consumers are increasingly demanding not only always-on connectivity, but better service quality and overall experiences. In fact, nearly two-thirds (62 percent) of respondents to Yankee Group’s 2012 US Consumer Survey, December, state that mobile data speeds are important to them and almost the same number (63 percent) want to be connected all the time.

If you think we’ve got Big Data problems now—with “only” about 9 billion devices connected to the Internet—what’s the situation going to be like when that number soars to 50 billion at the end of the decade?

Oracle president Mark Hurd recently raised the possibility that unless businesses and government agencies can seize control over that Big Data explosion, then they’ll run the risk of simply being overwhelmed by vast volumes of data that they can’t find, control, manage, or secure—let alone analyze and exploit.

As a ZD.net article reported:

Hurd said that the world was “drowning” in vast amounts of data — which has grown eightfold in the past seven years — and companies are running out of space to store it all. With more than nine billion existing devices connected to the Internet, end businesses are struggling to cope with storing the vast amounts of data they collect.

Not only will the capacity for storage need to increase, he warned of a growing concern is the ability to store such vast amounts of data securely. Another growing problem is the ability to process the vast amount of data through data process or real-time analytics.

Indeed—what happens when that already-tricky situation is compounded dramatically as an additional 40 billion devices get connected to the Internet over the next several years and begin streaming out massive volumes of data about speeds and location and performance degradation and volume of usage and even such vital but narrowly focused applications such as whether or not your morning coffee is ready?

To help understand some of those implications, a new study commissioned by Oracle outlines some of the impacts those billions of devices will have on the data demands of businesses and other large organizations—and if we think our challenges today are best described as “Big Data,” just wait.

Drilling into this wild new world of machine-to-machine (M2M) data, the study—called “Designing an M2M Platform for the Connected World”—says that “M2M data from remotely located assets and devices in the field is increasingly being used more broadly for strategic purposes and value creation throughout the enterprise. It has also become a means for creating new market opportunities while providing a competitive advantage for enterprise users in their own key markets.”

I recall coming across an early discussion of this general phenomenon about 12 years ago when RFID technology first began to offer the promise of cost-efficient data streams and intelligence-gathering from machines.

While many big retailers, consumer-packaged-goods companies, and logistics companies initially expressed great interest in RFID technologies, their immediate concern was how in the world would they ever be able to manage the unprecedently massive streams of data emanating from these new networks of things.

Imagine that possibility cranked up exponentially as everything from mobile phones to shoes to cars and household appliances, from pets to smart meters to clothing and surgical devices, from heavy industrial equipment to security devices to assembly lines become stuffed with intelligence and begin spewing out digital records of what they’re doing, seeing, sensing, and shipping.

In commissioning its study about how businesses can take full advantage of this dynamic new world, Oracle sought to shed some light on the requirements for turning machine-to-machine raw data into actionable intelligence, along with an eye toward how those demands might shift over time.

Beecham Research found that because most early adopters of M2M technologies and solutions are looking to create new services built on these new data streams, top-priority initiatives have to be end-to-end security that ranges from the device all the way through to the data center and the end-consumer of the data; and, the need for these massive flows of data to be integreated fully with existing IT systems in ways that allow the data to be analyzed and transformed into business insights.

As a result, the study says, companies should pursue these initiatives with an eye toward launching innovative products and services: “Although data storage requirements for M2M solutions have often not been huge in the past, this is changing with very large volumes of data expected in the future. In addition, insight from real-time intelligence can open up a whole new world of solutions.”

Along the way, the M2M movement is expected to join forces with another disruptive force in the IT world: cloud computing.

Survey respondents from around the world said that “Leveraging the cloud was noted as key in M2M projects, as it greatly reduces the cost and complexity of delivering M2M solutions,” Oracle said. “In fact, 90 percent of respondents noted the cloud as being ‘vitally important’ to M2M initiatives.”

Tech companies hoping to play a role in this dynamic new field will have to determine whether they want to be niche players that require extensive integration with other vendors’ equipment, or if they want to try to play a broader role that allows customers to focus more on business outcomes and less on cobbling together various point solutions.

iGR estimates that in 2011, approximately 433,000 terabytes of mobile data traffic flowed over the world’s cellular data network networks per month. By 2016, iGRforecasts mobile data traffic to rise to nearly 7 million terabytes per month.

iGR’s mobile data traffic model estimates the amount of bandwidth (in MBs) consumed by a given activity – e.g., checking email, listening to streaming music or watching streaming video, checking social sites, etc. iGR has estimated the traffic generated on a per application/use basis and that necessarily means a reliance on average values for how much bandwidth these various activities consume along with an average for how many times in a given time period an end user engages in the given activity.

Some 3/4 of the world’s human inhabitants now have access to a mobile phone, as the evolution of the wireless market is no longer “so much about the phone, but how it is used,” according to a World Bank-infoDev report released July 17. There were fewer than 1 billion global mobile phone subscriptions, pre- or post-paid, in 2000. That’s grown to more than 6 billion, nearly 5 billion of which are in developing countries. With multiple subscription ownership on the rise, active mobile subscriptions are likely to soon total more than the global human population, according to the World Bank and infoDev, its technology entrepreneurship and innovation program. The shift towards how owners are using their phones is evident in the rapid growth of Internet-enabled smartphone ownership, as well as the fast growing number of mobile application downloads. More than 30 billion mobile apps were downloaded in 2011, according to the World Bank report.

“In developing countries, citizens are increasingly using mobile phones to create new livelihoods and enhance their lifestyles, while governments are using them to improve service delivery and citizen feedback mechanisms,” according to the “Information and Communications for Development 2012: Maximizing Mobile” report.

“Mobile communications offer major opportunities to advance human and economic development – from providing basic access to health information to making cash payments, spurring job creation, and stimulating citizen involvement in democratic processes,” commented World Bank vice president for Sustainable Development Rachel Kyte.

The third in the World Bank’s series on Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) for Development, this latest report on mobile phones and technologies analyzes the growth and evolution of mobile telephony and the rise of data-based services, including apps, to handheld devices. The consequences for development of the emerging “app economy” are investigated, particularly as they pertain to agriculture, health, financial services and government, as is how it’s changing approaches to entrepreneurship and employment, the authors explain.

“The mobile revolution is right at the start of its growth curve: mobile devices are becoming cheaper and more powerful while networks are doubling in bandwidth roughly every 18 months and expanding into rural areas,” noted Tim Kelly, lead ICT policy specialist at the World Bank and one of the report’s authors.

Examples cited in the World Bank-infoDev press release include:

In India, the state of Kerala’s mGovernment program has deployed over 20 applications and facilitated more than 3 million interactions between the government and citizens since its launch in December 2010.

Kenya has emerged as a leading player in mobile for development, largely due to the success of the M-PESA mobile payment ecosystem. Nairobi-based AkiraChix, for example, provides networking and training for women technologists.

In Palestine, Souktel’s JobMatch service is helping young people find jobs. College graduates using the service reported a reduction in the time spent looking for employment from an average of twelve weeks to one week or less, and an increase in wages of up to 50 percent.

In the first quarter of 2012 the average U.S. mobile subscriber used 450 MB of data per month, according to research firm Nielsen. That figure is more than double the average of 208 MB per month for all U.S. mobile subscribers in the first quarter of 2011. The usage statistics, provided exclusively to FierceWireless, come from data in monthly cell phone bills of at least 65,000 mobile users who volunteered to participate in the company's ongoing research. Nielsen did not break out the average monthly data usage among U.S. smartphone owners (the company's figures cover both smartphones and feature phones). However, between the first quarter of 2011 and the first quarter of 2012, the nation's smartphone penetration rate went from a significant minority to half of all U.S. mobile subscribers. The focus on average usage is particularly noteworthy now, since Verizon Wireless (NYSE:VZ) has launched share data plans and AT&T Mobility (NYSE:T) will do so next month. Both plans allow customers to share a pool of data among multiple people on a single account, allowing, say, family with higher data usage to share a bucket of data with those with lower data usage.

“Everything can and will be wirelessly connected. The smartphone will be the platform, the hub, command central for you home, your healthcare, your car, your wallet… People depend on (technology because) it enriches their lives versus making it harder," states Cathy Coughlin, Chief Marketing Officer, AT&T.

The average UK consumer now sends 50 texts per week which has more doubled in four years with over 150 billion text messages sent in 2011. Almost another ninety minutes per week is spent accessing social networking sites and e-mail, or using a mobile to access the internet, while for the first time ever time spent on calls on both fixed and mobile phones has declined. Ofcom's Communications Market Report 2012 shows that traditional forms of communications are declining in popularity, with the overall time spent talking on the phone falling by 5% in 2011. This reflects a 10% fall in the volume of calls from landlines, and for the first time ever, a fall in the volume of mobile calls (by just over 1%) in 2011. Teenagers and young adults are leading these changes in communication habits, increasingly socialising with friends and family online and through text messages despite saying they prefer to talk face to face.

These changes also reflect the rapid increase in ownership of internet connected devices, such as tablets and smartphones. Tablet ownership has jumped from 2% to 11% in 12 months, while one in ten UK adults now has an e-reader. Two fifths of UK adults now own a smartphone, with the same proportion saying their phone is the most important device for accessing the internet. Smartphones are also affecting people's shopping habits, encouraging online bargain hunting or Robo (Research offline buy online) shopping with over half of smartphone users claiming to use their phone in some way when out shopping. Internet connected 'smart TVs' are also growing in popularity with 5% of UK households now owning one, giving consumers the ability to 'Turf' - both watch TV and surf the web . The report reveals that UK households now own on average three different types of internet-enabled device such as a laptop, smartphone or internet-enabled games console with 15% owning six or more devices. James Thickett, Ofcom's Director of Research, said: 'Our research reveals that in just a few short years, new technology has fundamentally changed the way that we communicate. Talking face to face or on the phone are no longer the most common ways for us to interact with each other. 'In their place, newer forms of communications are emerging which don't require us to talk to each other especially among younger age groups. This trend is set to continue as technology advances and we move further into the digital age.'

The global mobile industry revenue is on track to hit $1.5 trillion. Ity should be noted that industry revenues have tripled in the last 10 years. Mobile operator’s revenue reached a new milestone at the end of 2011. The total global mobile operator revenue exceeded $1 trillion for the first time. The operator profits have more than doubled in the last 10 years. The trifecta of fast broadband networks, well-designed mobile computing devices, and the insatiable supply of content, applications, and services has unleashed consumer demand for more like never before.

If we look at the history of the mobile industry, the first generation was primarily focused on voice and this era persisted for a good 10-15 years before 2G messaging and very basic data services were introduced. A decade later, data services started to become more interesting as 3G networks enabled faster access speeds and new applications. When Apple released iPhone in 2007, followed by Google’s Android in 2008, the industry was turned on its head. The implications was apparent at the time, tthat these far-reaching new devices were foretelling how impactful DATA was becoming for people in both their work and play. Today, data makes up the majority of all wireless devices usage.

"We believe that Google's acquisition of our more than 50 Mobile Transmit Diversity beam forming technology patents underlines the need for such a technology in mobile broadband devices," Osmo Hautanen, CEO of Magnolia Broadband, said in a statement. "We look forward to deployment of this innovative technology in smart phones, tablets and other mobile broadband devices, to provide faster data throughput, better coverage and wider range."

The software Google's new patents relate to can be embedded into any mobile broadband device, Hautanen added. Google, however, did not acquire the software, which remains the property of Magnolia and will remain available to mobile device vendors and chipset companies.

The company is currently expanding this technology to improve streaming video and peer-to-peer applications on tablets and other mobile broadband devices. It says it will use the proceeds from the patent sale to finance ongoing research and development.

Google's latest buy comes after the company recently picked up a large number of patents through its acquisition of Motorola Mobility, which is currently locked in a high-profile patent battle with Apple, and is under investigation for patent abuse in the EU.

Both Intel and Google started the week in acquisitive modes, with the former announcing a massive $375m patent deal with InterDigital, and the latter acquiring over 50 patents from Magnolia Broadband for an unspecified amount. It appears that the mobile-broadband patent wars are not only continuing to churn the tech world, they're also continuing to cause big money to change hands among big players.

"These patents will support Intel's strategic investments in the mobile segment," said Chipzilla's general counsel Doug Melamed about his company's Monday move. "The addition of these patents expands our already large, strong and diverse portfolio of intellectual property."

Over in Warren, New Jersey, Magnolia Broadband's CEO Osmo Hautanen offered his opinion of Google's largesse, saying, "We believe that Google's acquisition of our more than 50 Mobile Transmit Diversity beam forming technology patents underlines the need for such a technology in mobile broadband devices."

The MTD patents, which Magnolia Broadband developed in a research and testing effort of over a decade, cover technologies to increase spectrum utilization, expand coverage, improve uplink transmission speeds, and improve mobile devices' battery life.

Interestingly, although the MTD patent portfolio was acquired by Google, Hautanen noted that "The software, which can be embedded into any mobile broadband device remains the property of Magnolia Broadband and will be made available to mobile device vendors and chipset companies."

Magnolia board chairman Yaron Eitan chimed in on this point as well, saying, "We look forward to deployment of this innovative technology in smart phones, tablets and other mobile broadband devices, to provide faster data throughput, better coverage and wider range."

One can only assume that there is many a hurried discussion this Monday morning among the legal teams at Apple, HTC, Samsung, and others about the murky mobile-broadband patent landscape. And as Intel continues its deep-pocket efforts to move into the mobile market, odds are that ARM's corner offices are abuzz, as well.

Google’s patent portfolio has just gained a little weight, as the software/search engine giant has cemented its purchase of more than 50 patents from Magnolia Broadband. There’s no mention of how much green Google ponied up to acquire this wireless catalog of goodies, but the new arsenal of intellectual property will likely mesh well with the company’s more prominent purchase of Motorola Mobility. In addition to possibly putting the technology of this purchase to use, Google is also saving them for future legal quarrels.